Current research: Morality and the emotions

From the standpoint of both philosophers and psychologists, the study of moral psychology has undergone an affective revolution over the last three decades. This revolution has generated substantial interest in the role of the emotions in moral and political talk, thought, and behavior. Further, it has been claimed that some emotions are distinctively moral in nature.However, what it means for an emotion to count as moral and which emotions count as the moral ones are issues in need of further elucidation. My current research, which builds upon my dissertation work, addresses these questions. I am particularly interested in two emotions that are often but obscurely referred to as “moral”: disgust and anger. I’m also interested in the gendered social/political norms that govern the expression of anger, and how disgust and contempt contribute to the moralization of certain eating practices.

Email me for drafts: mbollard@amherst.edu

"What Makes an Emotion Moral?"

In this paper, I develop an empirically-informed answer to the question of how to vindicate the existence of a distinctively moral emotion by introducing a motivational theory of moral emotion, which defines the moral emotions as those with distinctively moral action tendencies and goals.

"Is There Such a Thing as Genuinely Moral Disgust?"

In this paper, I defend a novel, skeptical view about moral disgust. In so doing, I reject a widely-held, albeit largely implicit, assumption in the moral disgust literature that there exists a distinctive psychological state of moral disgust. To give a positive answer to what I call the ontological question about moral disgust, thereby vindicating its existence, I propose that a given psychological state must be shown to bear sufficient resemblance to the familiar, generic version of disgust, yet be distinguishable from it in virtue of its distinctively moral nature. I argue that existing accounts of moral disgust fail to satisfy these conditions. Further, I contend that we should be skeptical about the general prospect of giving a positive answer to the ontological question about moral disgust, because the empirical evidence that can be invoked in favor of moral disgust’s existence is too equivocal to properly distinguish (putatively) moral disgust from other psychological states, particularly anger.

I received the 2018 Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress (RoME) Young Ethicist Prize for this paper.

"In Defense of Distinctively Moral Anger"

In this paper, I defend the view that there is a distinctively moral subtype of anger. I argue that moral anger is a genuine form of anger that is differentiable from generic anger primarily in virtue of its goals and action tendencies. Moral anger is typically triggered by perceived injustice, and its action tendencies aim to satisfy two moral goals: a communicative goal, and a retributive goal. In this way, I offer an empirically-supported account that constitutes a positive answer to the ontological question about moral anger, thereby demonstrating that it is possible to vindicate the existence of a genuinely moral emotion while making sense of the idea that the moral emotions should be understood as a recognizable subset within the general class of the emotions.